(1906– ).

Literary critic.

A new biography of McCormick, Eric Hall appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

p>Eric Hall McCormick was born at Taihape on 17 June 1906 and was educated at Wellington College, Victoria University College, and Clare College, Cambridge. For a time until 1931 he was a school teacher, then a librarian, but after short terms on the staff of the Dunedin Public Library, the Hocken Library, and National Archives, he became editor of Centennial Publications in 1939–40. He was in the Middle East and Italy on war service till 1945 and in charge of Army Archives till 1947. In that year he was appointed a lecturer in English at Auckland University College but in 1951 he relinquished this to devote himself to literary and historical research. In 1962 he was invited to give a series of lectures at Leeds University on New Zealand literature. His publications include Letters and Art in New Zealand (1940), Works of Frances Hodgkins (1954), The Expatriate (1954), Eric Lee-Johnson (1956), New Zealand Literature (1959), Tasman and New Zealand (1959), and The Inland Eye (1959). In 1963 he edited New Zealand or Recollections of it, by Edward Markham.